Friday 9 October 2009 07.55 EDT
First published on Friday 9 October 2009 07.55 EDT

Golf and rugby union are now Olympic sports. This morning the IOC announced that as of 2016 gold medals will be awarded in both sports. It is customary at this point to produce a thorough, well-reasoned and largely economic and logistics based argument as to the merits of the decision. Those who rail against the inexplicable over-representation of, say, kayaking, will point to golf's global reach and its economic might, or rugby's impressive amateur spread.

I don't think any of this really helps in the end because the merits of Olympic inclusion or otherwise are almost entirely a subjective thing. This is because the Olympic Games itself is just an idea, something bound up in emotion and ideology. Basically it all depends on what the Olympic Games looks like in your head. I know one former Great Britain sprinter who seriously believes the idea of gold medals for team sports is a nonsense, that they somehow don't count. That's what his personal Olympics looks like.

Which is where golf comes in. In my personal Olympics golf has no place – and many people will share this view. I have nothing against golf itself. As a sport to play, golf is pure pleasure; and when it's played well a matter of breathtaking skill.

But still the idea of professional golf at the Olympics makes me slightly hate the Olympics, which I also love unconditionally. This is because I want the Olympics to be, as much as possible, about benevolent aspiration. The idea of an Olympic "movement" is based in sport as a tool for peaceable international relations, of sport offering not just areas of connection, but rewards for development and ambition and struggle.

This Olympics – the personal Olympics that I carry around in my head – will not be furthered by the spectacle of a man called Chip or Tug yahooing about with a gold medal around his neck before heading back to his seven-star hotel to pack for the Dubai Classic or the Abu Dhabi Crystal Platter Masters.

I want the Olympics to be a career high for people who are the best at doing stuff for precious little reward beyond things like the Olympic Games; a showcase for excellence born out of otherwise unrewarded obsession.

Without this quality – and golf and rugby both dilute it to some degree, as tennis already has – there is no real point in the Olympic Games existing at all. Not now, not when sport happens all the time everywhere, anyway.

Golf is a predatory and entirely commercial, highly skilled individual pursuit. But it chafes against the Olympic ideal of inclusivity – as do many other Olympic sports – and of bridge-building and of also really needing the Olympics, things without which the Olympics start to look oddly pointless.

Rugby, on the other hand, might just get into my personal highfalutin Olympics. This is purely subjective again, but there's enough of a whiff of the amateur and the only averagely paid to just about swing it. And only because it's rugby sevens we're talking about, a version of the sport that tends to tip towards the developing nations. Fiji would be among the favourites for a gold at the seven-man game. Portugal are decent. Kenya might be in with a shout. This at least looks and feels Olympic.

But if not golf, then what? People will laugh at darts but an Olympic darts gold medal would still be the biggest thing in darts. Darts would flower and blossom and prosper in its glow. Darts would love the Olympics back. Darts, sadly, has no chance, however, basically because it happens in a pub. It doesn't promote advanced cardiovascular fitness. Rightly or wrongly there are role-model issues, girth obstacles, boozing caveats, despite all of darts' recent progress towards appearing to be an "athletic" and even youthful sport.

And if not darts then why not squash, which also needs the Olympics badly, and would promote the Olympics and bear the Olympics aloft as its absolute pinnacle? Twenty20 cricket, albeit in its infancy, looks fairly tempting, if only because there's a good chance Australia might win and nobody does misty-eyed Corinthian sporting sentiment like an Aussie cricketer (witness the fetishism of the "baggy green").

Otherwise, there's women's boxing. There seems no obvious reason why this amateur sport shouldn't have got golf's spot this time around. Men's boxing is one of the great Olympic sports. Like the pole vault before it, there is no sensible argument against expanding its reach to include women, beyond the fact that women simply haven't been allowed to do it for that long.

Still, people will disagree about golf because the Olympics is just an idea that exists inside people's head and people's heads are all different. But I don't care, I know what the Olympics is meant to look like – and it doesn't wear executive slacks and a sun visor.